The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking eBook

Mountain sheep and cattle have the finest-flavored
meat, and are also richest in nitrogenous matter.
The mountain mutton of Virginia and North Carolina
is as famous as the English Southdown; but proper feeding
anywhere will make a new thing of the ordinary beef
and mutton. When our cattle are treated with
decent humanity,—­not driven days with scant
food and water, and then packed into cars with no
food and no water, and driven at last to slaughter
feverish and gasping in anguish that we have no right
to permit for one moment,—­we may expect
tender, wholesome, well-flavored meat. It is
astonishing that under present conditions it can be
as good as it is.

In well-fed animals, the fat forms about a third of
the weight, the largest part being in the loin.
In mutton, one-half is fat; in pork, three-quarters;
while poultry and game have very little.

The amount of bone varies very greatly. The loin
and upper part of the leg have least; nearly half
the entire weight being in the shin, and a tenth in
the carcass. In the best mutton and pork, the
bones are smaller, and fat much greater in proportion
to size.

VEAL and LAMB, like all young meats, are much less
digestible than beef or mutton. Both should have
very white, clear fat; and if that about the kidneys
is red or discolored, the meat should be rejected.
Veal has but sixteen parts of nitrogenous matter to
sixty-three of water, and the bones contain much more
gelatine than is found in older animals. But in
all bones much useful carbon and nitrogen is found;
three pounds of bone yielding as much carbon, and
six pounds as much nitrogen, as one pound of meat.
Carefully boiled, this nutriment can all be extracted,
and flavored with vegetables, form the basis of an
endless variety of soups.

PORK is of all meats the most difficult to digest,
containing as it does so large a proportion of fat.
In a hundred parts of the meat, only nine of nitrogen
are found, fat being forty-eight and water thirty-nine,
with but two of salty matters. Bacon properly
cured is much more digestible than pork, the smoke
giving it certain qualities not existing in uncured
pork. No food has yet been found which can take
its place for army and navy use or in pioneering.
Beef when salted or smoked loses much of its virtue,
and eight ounces of fat pork will give nearly three
times as much carbon or heat-food as the same amount
of beef; but its use is chiefly for the laborer, and
it should have only occasional place in the dietary
of sedentary persons.

The pig is liable to many most unpleasant diseases,
measles and trichina spiralis being the most fatal
to the eaters of meat thus affected; but the last—­a
small animalcule of deadly effect if taken alive into
the human stomach, as is done in eating raw ham or
sausage—­becomes harmless if the same meat
is long and thoroughly boiled. Never be tempted
into eating raw ham or sausage; and in using pork
in any form, try to have some knowledge of the pig.
A clean, well-fed pig in a well-kept stye is a wonderfully
different object from the hideous beast grunting its
way in many a Southern or Western town, feeding on
offal and sewage, and rolling in filth. Such
meat is unfit for human consumption, and the eating
of it insures disease.